Agriculture scientists have continuously worked to evolve coffee crops to battle an ever-changing climate for much of the past century.
Some of the most famous examples of these efforts are from the 60s and 70s, in which horticulturists and ag scientists worked to develop hybrids to fight against an invasive coffee tree fungus (called leaf rust) that was propagating across the coffee belt of Latin America. Plant-breeding work done by research centers in Portugal and Columbia helped to create hybrids that combined the flavor of Arabica flavor properties with the fungus-fighting properties of Robusta.
While this work resulted in much more robust coffee varietials that have produced the bulk of coffee over the past few decades, coffee breeders today are struggling to keep up with the accelerating change in climate across the world that is making it ever-harder for coffee farmers to grow their crops.
Enter gene editing. Newer technologies such as CRISPR utilize genetic manipulation techniques that involve changing an organism’s DNA, so instead of spending decades to create new varietals that combine the desirable characteristics of different breeds through traditional breeding techniques, gene editing can get there an order of magniture faster by editing out specific genetic traits.
However, gene editing still requires a significant amount of time to identify the host genes that need to be edited out. To accelerate this process even further, a company called Tropic Biosciences has developed a proprietary platform that combines gene-editing techniques such as CRISPR with another biotechnology process called RNA interference, or RNAi, to accelerate the gene discovery cycle and help develop new varietals much more quickly.
In a nutshell, Tropic Biosciences enables editing to a host’s DNA to alter the target of RNA interference, allowing for direct targeting of select target genes to degrade protein production. Genes that belong to the host (such as a gene that, for example, makes a crop more sensitive to high temperature) or genes that belong to viruses, pests, or fungi (like leaf rust) can be targeted in order to protect the host against these organisms.
The company’s unique platform (called GEiGS, short for “gene-editing induced gene-silencing”), is being used to develop its own product pipeline, which as you can probably guess by its name, is focused on tropical crop commodities such as coffee, bananas, and rice. The company is also working with other clients in the world of agriculture to license the GEiGS platform to develop new crops or avian flu resistance in poultry.
Tropic’s platform has attracted $35 million in new funding. The round, announced today, includes lead investor Blue Horizon and ADQ, Bloom8 (previously Rage Capital), Skyviews Life Science, Sucden Ventures, and Tekfen Ventures, among others.
